Question
Which linux in 2024?
- Posted on October 28, 2024
- UNIX/LinuxRocky LinuxUbuntu
Asked by David Nusbaum
We have a SaaS solution hosted on Digital Ocean and for years CentOS provided a rock solid and efficient platform. With the demise of CentOS, as we knew it, I’ve got to move to a new Linux distribution. We tend to run single service machines, a proxy server, an app server and a database server with redundancy for each, so each machine has a pretty narrow focus.
Ubuntu seems popular on DO.
Rocky or Alma would seem similar to CentOS.
My first foray into Rocky was a bit of a shock with out of memory issue when using the same size droplets as in the past. Some reading suggests I need to tweak the number of services started to make the footprint more reasonable, but this isn’t something I had to worry about before.
My first foray into Ubuntu resulted in a locked up server (simple lamp stack).
My question to the DO community is where are we today with Linux and where do I invest my time. Are RHEL based distributions getting heavy under IBM leadership? I Ubuntu going to be a stable as the old CentOS?
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.
Become a contributor for community
Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.
DigitalOcean Documentation
Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.
Resources for startups and SMBs
The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.
The developer cloud
Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.
Get started for free
Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*
*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.
Heya,
In my experience you either go with Almalinux(not Rocky) or Ubuntu. This should be a personal choice as they would provide almost similar results in my opinion. Having said that, if you have been using RHEL based distros up until now, Alma would be the way to go for me.
Hey David!
I personally like Ubuntu for DigitalOcean setups – it’s reliable, and once you tune it a bit, it’s pretty efficient even for smaller Droplets. It works well across different use cases, so it might be a good fit for your single-service machines with some light optimization.
Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux are both solid options if you want something close to the old CentOS feel. They’ll need a few tweaks on smaller setups, especially around memory usage, but they give you that familiar RHEL structure.
Debian is another good one if you’re looking for minimalism and stability; it’s lightweight, which is a plus for focused setups.
If you’re after simplicity, I’d say go with Ubuntu. If you want something closer to CentOS, give Rocky or Alma a try.
- Bobby
Heya,
I prefer using Ubuntu on DigitalOcean droplets, back in the days I was always using CentOS, so both Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux are good option if you want to have similar experience, also both are community-driven,
I enjoyed that Rocky Linux was started right away when Red Hat’s decision to discontinue CentOS 8 as a stable, downstream release of RHEL. Also one of the original founders of CentOS, initiated the Rocky Linux project shortly after Red Hat’s announcement. Many people went on using Rocky Linux just for that reason.
In my opinion Ubuntu is simple to use and it is a great option, but Alma and Rocky are great options as well.
Regards